Share This article

The GTX 780 may have launched over a year ago at this point, but the Asus Poseidon is such a unique design it’s worth revisiting the architecture. The overwhelming majority of video cards are air-cooled; water cooling is reserved for die-hard enthusiasts or AMD’s R9 295X2. Asus has taken the water-cooling concept and done something unique — it’s built a GPU that can be cooled with air or water, depending on your preferences. Typically, these two methods don’t mix — you can buy a GPU with a high-end air solution or a handful of pre-built GPUs with waterblocks attached, but an air-cooled GPU with water pipes? That’s something new and different.

Card design

How did Asus hit its design targets? By simplifying the cooling loop. Most cooler blocks use a series of channels cut into the metal of the heatsink — the water flows directly through the channels, over the top of the components, and cools the entire card. Asus’ design is simpler — water enters at one end, flows around the copper heatsink, and then exits as shown below.

This is going to have an impact on the total performance of the design, but shouldn’t prevent the water-cooled variant from outperforming the air-cooled variant. Water cooling may come with its share of headaches, but liquid absorbs heat far more efficiently than air does.

If you’ve used a high-end GPU recently, you may have noticed that the card sometimes produces an audible whine. This is caused by the power circuitry on the card itself and it can impact both AMD and Nvidia cards. Asus claims that by using high-grade power components, it has eliminated the whine — and from what we can tell, that’s true. The distinctive electronic sound, typically only audible at full load, never puts in an appearance on the Poseidon family.

No that’s just a 4GB + 4GB card, you have just as much memory as with normal CF setup, and i wish they would stop calling those cards 8GB cards.

Otherwise i could also start calling my setup a 18GB setup.

LtMatt

Havor have you been drinking? :P

That my friend, is a single 290X with 8GB of memory. I know as a friend has a couple. Ask OCUK customer services, if you don’t believe me. :)

havor

Ooo i was reading you wrong, i was thinking you called a 295X2 a 8GB card.

And yeah ii am well aware of the card, but that card cost $1000 per card, and there are only 250 ever made, so even do it would technical be the best solution out there, i still am not willing to invest $4000 at once.

As i believe GTX 880 or 390X will come with more memory, and i can survive pretty well on 3 Titans till then, or the next gen after that.

LtMatt

No worries Havor. :)

Michael Vasovski

“but if there ware a 8GB 290X i would gladly trade them in”

Joel Hruska

I think the bigger point — outside the R9 295X2 / GTX 780 comparison — is that water cooling is going to become more common. I’m not saying enthusiasts will embrace the idea of self-built radiators en masse (it’s rather complicated to do that), but I think liquid cooling and AIB solutions are going to be the drop-in option of choice. At the highest end, we may see simple water cooling loops with sealed containers more along these lines.

The benefits are just too huge. If Nvidia gave enthusiasts more headroom to push frequencies and voltage, I think the 780 samples could’ve gone even farther — and these weren’t great ASICs to start with.

As for the R9, the CryoVenom R9 290 could nearly match the GTX 780 Ti. From 947MHz to 1250MHz is nothing to sneeze at — all while maintaining a temperature of less than 50C.

Oranji Juusu

All a vendor has to do is sell a flagship card with an CLWC solution and the market would go wild.

I’m also surprised a vendor hasn’t taken the 295X2 and upped the radiator to 240/280mm for a slight premium.

Phobos

Seems the gtx 780 wins in price vs the r9 295, otherwise they both perform very similar. I do wonder if you test them using vsync on, given how vsync on caps the frames at 60fps it does not put too much stress on the GPU’s making them run much cooler. If so how much of a difference in cooling will they get using water cooling?

Bryan_S

The 295×2 tended to dominate in Minimum frame rate as well as average. With just the average… this review is not very useful.

NoldorElf

It’s not as good as it seems. Certainly it does not give the flexibility as this review suggests.

Unfortunately, the tubing is made out of aluminum, making it questionable at best for watercooling. The Maximus VI Formula suffered from similar flaws. I would not want this in a loop because in 1-2 years, there will be serious issue with galvanic corrosion. It’s best to have a “no more aluminum” mentality for your loop.

A direct comparison I think would be a pair of 290X + a water cooling block in Crossfire, rather than the 295X2, which uses an AIO solution. The issue here is overclocking headroom. This generation, the 780Ti responded better to voltage than the 290X, but if you were to buy 2x 290X, you’d probably have more headroom than with 2x 780 Poseidon. Drawbacks to the 2x 290X are their higher power consumption.

All in all, with the 4gb of VRAM, I think the 2x 290X are a better buy, despite the higher power consumption, unless you play games that don’t scale well with CF but do scale well with SLI.

Taken alone, it’s not a bad product, but I would not use it for water cooling.

Joel Hruska

The R9 290 that I tested from CryVenom had amazing headroom but was also a handpicked, hand-tested SKU that the company pre-validates. I can’t use it to effectively compare against Asus, and of course 1-2 comparison cards don’t really tell us anything about performance distribution.

86james randy

wow GTX 780 SLI Water cool win again R9 295X2… by 5FPS… what about price ?

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.